Rep. Steve King (R-IA) joined SiriusXM host Rebecca Mansour and guest host Frances Martel for a Friday interview on Breitbart News Tonight during which he called for the deployment of the National Guard to “sanctuary cities” in California to combat immigration-related “lawlessness.”

King began by expressing support for President Donald Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard to parts of the southern border. “I am absolutely in favor of deploying the national guard down to the border,” he said. “I don’t know that there’s another alternative that matches up to that as far as the effectiveness is concerned.”

“We’re in a situation where you have an invading army — mostly unarmed — but an invading army of 1,500 that starts off 1,500 miles away,” said King. “It says, ‘We are marching to America. We’re going to sneak into the country. We’re going to storm her borders, and once we set foot on U.S. soil, they have to treat us as asylees.’ And they’ve all been trained to say all the right words: ‘I fear going back to my home country because I have a credible fear that I’ll be killed if I go back home.’”

Trump and the GOP missed an opportunity to begin construction of the wall via March’s omnibus spending bill negotiations. “As far as the wall, I don’t know how we get that leverage right now, not until coming to the fall when we need to get new appropriation bills with leverage,” King remarked.

“I think the president should’ve used more leverage to get a wall built. I think he backed away from that a little too soon, and I continue to believe the president received a mandate to build a wall, not just a few miles of it, but 2,000 miles of it if he so chose. He also has a mandate to end sanctuary cities, Kate’s Law, Sarah’s Law, the Davis Oliver Act, which honored the lives of the two sheriff’s deputies that were killed by the murderer who laughed at his sentencing and his conviction and now has been sentenced to death in California.”

Rep. Dave Brat (R-VA) shared discontent with the most recent omnibus bill along the same lines as King’s.

King said Democrats view illegal aliens as part of their political support base. “Democrats are looking at the illegal aliens coming into America as undocumented Democrats,” he said. “As long as there’s a political benefit for them, be counting those folks on their side of the ledger, we’re going to have them pushing back in a place where we can’t get this legislation through the Senate.”

King warned that California’s defiance of federal immigration law via “sanctuary” laws is sowing seeds of “civil conflict.”

King stated, “Also, we get to the question of the census, and the very idea that we can’t ask people, ‘Are you a citizen of the United States?’ without being sued by Xavier Becerra and Jerry Brown out of California and others, I mean, America has digressed so far away from the clarity of the Constitution being the supreme law of the land. When the federal government has legislation passed that is within the boundaries of the Constitution, that becomes a supreme statute of the land.”

“We’re being pushed back on by states that defy federal law, so the path towards a civil conflict is being drawn now by states like California,” King added. “We have to be bold and strong. I would send the National Guard to the border. I’d send them to California to secure the streets of those cities so that we didn’t have the lawlessness of the sanctuaries that they have created out in California.”